Yury Nikitin - The Grail of Sir Thomas

Thomas gasped with indignation, his face turned red, eyes popped out. “Sir wonderer! How dare you!.. I can tolerate you accepting this rat – he was a brave knight long ago. But these… they…”

Gorvel gave a predatory smirk. “…once were soldiers of our glorious hosts,” he jeered. “That’s all right. Look! There are some worse men running! And I swear on Holy Grail that your strange pilgrim would accept them too!”

The Black Beard and two of his gang were climbing behind the marauders, almost up with them. The villains had exhausted faces stained with mud, the last one had his hair matted and stuck up, like a comb, with dry blood. However, the three of them retained their sabers and daggers, bows and full quivers looking out from behind their shoulders.

Thomas was seething, his voice lost to fury. Gorvel looked ready for anything, his back pressed on the steep, the gleaming sword in hand – but his eyes were fixed on the pilgrim, his whole manner showed he was just an armored warrior while all the leadership and responsibility was upon this… very holy pilgrim.

The marauders were the first to run to the shelter. Oleg nodded towards the left end of the cleft. They obeyed at once, as former soldiers, stood there with bare swords and closed shields.

The villains came running, rattling, frequently collapsing on the ground. “You didn’t come,” the Black Beard cried hoarsely. “We decided to follow…”

“Guard the right end,” Oleg ordered. The Black Beard nodded, his breast heaving. The three of them put arrows on bow strings, turned to the hill foot. Hazars were running up fast, bent forward like spiders, moving their limbs briskly, stones poured down from under their feet.

“They have no bows,” Oleg said. “Let them as close as possible!” He could have shot any Hazar by that time, but the villains would also start shooting their cheap bows of village hunters then. Unfeathered, unsighting arrows. It will be good for them to hit in twenty steps. “Shoot after I do,” he warned severely.

He waited for a while, shot an arrow into the breast of a big Hazar, almost the last of climbers, fingertips took another arrow at once, it went straight into another foe’s eye, then he shot the third Hazar, the fourth, always selecting the farthest ones, as the closer would be reached by villains.

Below, there were ferocious cries, screams, shrieks, clang of steel. Five out of the twenty Hazars had run up to the crevice. The marauders jumped out to meet them with flashes of curved swords. A cut-off forearm fell to Oleg’s feet. Hazars screamed in high-pitched voices, marauders swore. Thomas and Gorvel rushed to help them but came at the moment when the last Hazar collapsed, splashing his blood around, on the dead bodies of congeners.

The marauder with naked breast bared his teeth in fierce smirk. “See the worth of soldier guard, konung?” he cried to Oleg. “My name’s Roland.”

One marauder was wounded, the rest splattered with blood of others. Oleg climbed on a stone ledge. Below, at its very foot, a huge half-naked barbarian was fidgeting on his horse. His face was painted with colored clay, a saber glittered in hand.

“Make a fire,” Oleg said softly, without looking back. “Cut green twigs off the bushes behind you.”

Gorvel raised his eyebrows in fascination. “Some magic?”

“Yes,” Oleg told him. “The most powerful one! They want to speak to us.”

The villains ran to the bushes eagerly, cut both just over their roots, while marauders made a fire deftly for all to see. When blue-grey clouds of smoke began to rise, with different intervals, above Hazar camp, Oleg covered the fire with branches, removed them, put down again for a while and flung away: the green leaves had rolled up in tubes, the thick smoke about to turn fire. He stood up, fingered the hilts of throwing knives. “I’ll go and see what they want.”

“Go to these devils?” Thomas cried in awe.

Gorvel watched him with disapproval. Marauders and villains, bunched in two close groups, argued with heat, cast suspicious glances at the pilgrim. The marauder who called himself Roland said loudly, “Are you going to sell us to those beasts?”

Oleg did not reply. “Keep your sword bare,” he told Thomas. “We’ll meet at the middle, and you… you and Gorvel show you are ready to come to my aid. You’ll have a shorter run down than Hazars – up the slope to their chieftain.”

“Do you expect an ambush?” Thomas asked anxiously.

“Just in case. It will come right if they see us at call.”

At the foot of the hill, Hazars were roasting meat, turning a huge spit with a whole saiga. Horses had been taken away. A tall barbarian was climbing up the slope. His body was covered from head to feet with drawings in colored clay. A pair of short leather pants made all his clothing. His thick wrists gleamed with massive bracelets, and armlets of the same metal embraced his arms just above elbows.

Oleg looked at him closer, slowed down his pace. The barbarian glanced above once or twice. As he saw his ruse discovered, he went up faster, in quick steps.

Oleg shuddered as he watched the leader of Hazars coming. To the waist he was naked but looked as though clad in bony armor composed of many fragments, with their edges covering each other. Joints were marked by swollen scars that had turned bone or even stone. On his belt of coupled iron plates, he had a huge Arabian sword and, on another side, an axe with curved blade.

The Hazar was heavier and more massive than Oleg. His legs resembled thick logs, he was all covered by a dark bark of his “bone armor.” No sword will slash through it, no iron arrow hit. Oleg remembered him as a fierce and fearless warrior, but as the years passed, his friends died, only few lived to be old and killed, in Khazarian way, by own grandchildren for being useless – this one was still riding fiery horses, making forays and bringing captives. In the best years of Khazar Kaganat, he became a warrior hero, scary in his might.

But ages passed since that. The Kaganat was shattered with a sudden blow of furious Svyatoslav. The few Khazar survivors scattered, dissolved among neighbor nations. Only this invulnerable warrior, whom the last generations called Karganlyk, gathered a hundred of the same implacable fighters as himself and continued foraying. Not on Rus’, where a sure death awaited, but on Pechenegs and Kumans. He robbed them, going farther and farther to the south.

Oleg looked in Karganlyk’s face, as motionless as a tortoise shell, with pity.

Karganlyk’s stone jaws came apart slowly. “You again, my Old Enemy?” he roared.

“I haven’t met you for ages, Karganlyk,” Oleg said instead of greeting, as he wished neither good day nor good night to such an enemy.

“Why did the Old Sorcerer come again to the land of Khazar?” Karganlyk asked him,

“The dog had a house,” Oleg replied gloomily. “Until the rain burnt it. Where do you see the land of Khazar?”

Karganlyk stamped his foot angrily. “This is our land!”

“The dog had a house,” Oleg said again. “The northern lands of the Khazar Kaganat were taken by the princes of North, the eastern lands – by Kumans and Pechenegs, and southern… But you came not to discuss old times, did you? I have much to recall with pleasure, but why should you re-open the old wound?”

Karganlyk glowered at him. The Hazar’s heart pounded, raising a hot wave. He had already been a field chieftain when he met that sorcerer. A sorcerer and hermit whose cave had been ruined, so he walked across Khazarian steppes to the south to become, as he explained, an anchoret in deserts. That was the time Obadia had just adopted the true faith and burnt the old tribal gods, declaring them to be idols. He ordered to capture the hermit and sacrifice him to the new god to mark his triumph. However, on the way to the nomad camp the sorcerer managed to free himself, slaughter the five strongest warriors, and steal the best horses. The numerous pursuers were killed by his arrows or drowned in a bog. Only on the fifth day did Karganlyk, with ten young daredevils, come upon him! And Karganlyk was the only one to survive, though his two arrow wounds still kept ached at bad weather.